In this Friday, March 2, 2018 file photo, televangelist Jim Bakker leaves a funeral service for the Rev. Billy Graham in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
(RNS)–Televangelist Jim Bakker, who spent five years in prison for a sex and money scandal involving his Praise the Lord ministry and returned to broadcasting “The Jim Bakker Show,” has died at 86, his wife announced.
“It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,” reads an announcement from Lori Bakker on Monday, Oct. 5, on the Facebook page of the show. “For 66 years, Jim gave his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry. Jim loved people deeply. He loved this ministry, and he loved the friends and partners who stood with him throughout the years. Even in his final days, his heart was still for the work of God and for the Gospel to continue reaching the world.”
Asking for privacy for the family, she added: “Jim finished his race with faith. His voice, his vision, and his legacy will never be forgotten.”
His son, Jay Bakker, posted on Facebook on Feb. 23 that his father had been ill, saying he had “endured multiple strokes over the past few years.”
On that same day, on an episode of “The Jim Bakker Show” posted on YouTube, the elder Bakker was seeking support for his ministry as he had decades before.
“And we need you to help keep this ministry on the air,” said Bakker, identified with a chyron that said “Pioneer of Christian Television” after the show featured Endtime magazine editor Dave Robbins. “Sixty years ago, I started Christian television with Pat Robertson and started ministries all over the world. … I’m back on television and I’m going to stay until Jesus come, the Lord willing, and tell you that we got to get ready.”
By the time Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye, were forced to give up their Praise the Lord ministry — known as PTL — in 1987, they were a well-known television couple with a loyal following. His grinning visage and aggressive fundraising had become a regular staple of Christian television, while she was recognized as much for her heavy application of mascara as for religious teachings.
The Bakkers were among a popular wave of religious broadcasters during the late 1970s and 1980s, when they competed for viewership against rivals such as Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. The PTL was among the most successful, as Jim Bakker preached an upbeat message of optimism, health and wealth. At the height of its popularity, their flagship show, “The PTL Club,” reached an audience of 13 million viewers, while the affiliated Heritage USA theme park attracted 6 million visitors annually.
Yet despite the PTL’s outward boom, a series of problems brewed that would eventually doom the Bakkers’ ministry.
With success and prosperity, the Bakkers had begun to live an opulent lifestyle. As money poured into PTL, significant sums were diverted to the Bakkers and staff members. Large sums were used for purposes other than those for which they had been raised, including fancy homes and clothes.
As the decade wore on, the ministry slid further into debt, which led the federal government to move against PTL and the Bakkers.
At the same time, it was revealed that in 1980, Baker had a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn and that she was paid to keep quiet about the incident.
The controversies brought a rather ignominious downfall for the Bakkers, who had started out together as upstart Midwestern religious activists.
Bakker’s parents were of Dutch ancestry but had left the Reformed Church for Pentecostalism. A Michigan native, Bakker found religion himself in the 1950s, when he ran over a young boy with his car. The boy was not killed, but the accident took Bakker on a spiritual search that led him the next year to enter North Central Bible College, an Assemblies of God school in Minneapolis.
It was there that Bakker met Tammy Faye LaValley, who attended the school with the intention of becoming a missionary. By the beginning of 1961, they had decided to marry, which was against school policy. So the pair dropped out, and the Assemblies of God eventually licensed Bakker.
His charisma at the pulpit of small churches around the country caught the eye of fledgling televangelist Pat Robertson, who had just founded the Christian Broadcasting Network.
In 1965, the Bakkers moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, and Jim began his career as a television minister. Bakker stayed at CBN until 1972, when he claimed that God had told him to resign and move on.
After a short stint with the fledgling California-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, Bakker moved to North Carolina. The following year, he took a preexisting talk show and renamed it “The PTL (Praise the Lord) Club,” using a former furniture showroom he redecorated as a studio.
Bakker bought 25 acres in Charlotte, which became the first Heritage Village, a Christian recreational-vacation center modeled on Disneyland. In 1978, he opened a new Heritage Village near Fort Mill, South Carolina. Bakker raised money through his television show and developed a program for PTL partners who purchased lifetime shares, which would allow them to stay at Heritage USA for a specified number of days each year.
It was this transaction that caught the eye of federal prosecutors, who eventually charged Bakker with 24 counts of fraud for bilking followers out of the $158 million they spent on oversold time-share apartments.
Bakker resigned from PTL in 1987, and he turned the corporation over to fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell, with whom he had a simmering rivalry for years. Falwell, a Baptist fundamentalist, quickly turned on the Pentecostal Bakker, accusing him of paying blackmail to Jessica Hahn and having “homosexual problems dating back to 1956.”
The Assemblies of God, acting upon the evidence of sexual misconduct, defrocked Bakker. He eventually won ordination from the Pennsylvania-based New Covenant Christian Church.
While attempting to start a new ministry in Orlando, Florida, Bakker was indicted in 1988 and was convicted in 1989. During the trial, a sobbing Bakker was taken for psychiatric counseling after breaking down in the courtroom. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison.
The sentence was reduced on appeal to eight years, and Bakker was released after five years. During his time behind bars, however, Tammy Faye Bakker demanded a divorce. They were divorced in 1992. She became Tammy Faye Messner in 1993, when she married Roe Messner, a family friend and business associate of the Bakkers. She died after a colon cancer diagnosis in 2007.
The prison stay left Bakker in financial ruin. As he tried to repair his public image and rebuild his ministry, his paychecks were garnished to pay off taxes and litigation fees.
After being released from federal parole in October 1997, Bakker moved to the Los Angeles International Dream Center, a Christian home for addicts and gang members. Bakker spent his time in California working in inner-city ghettos, reaching out to drug addicts and the homeless, and teaching them in Bible classes.
While at the Dream Center, Bakker met youth counselor Lori Beth Graham. They married in 1998.
Access to MinistryWatch content is free. However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts. To make a donation, click here.
After 18 months of self-imposed exile in Los Angeles, Bakker returned to North Carolina in 1999. While back in his home state, he took over a ministry run by his daughter. He used the opportunity to garner speaking engagements and plot a comeback to the pulpit.
It took years to reach reconciliation with his son, Jamie, who battled alcoholism for years after the scandal. Jamie eventually started a ministry to neglected young people and drug users. “I’m not going to go through my life thinking my father is a thief and defrauder,” he said in 2001.
Bakker claimed remorse for his sexual encounter with Hahn, and the financial improprieties that led to his felony conviction.
“I had allowed the quest for material possessions and the deceitfulness of riches and the lusts for other things to choke the Word of God in my own life and in the lives of my family members and coworkers,” Bakker wrote in his book “I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond,” referring to Jesus’ Parable of the Sower in the Gospel of Mark.
In 1996, the year that book was published, he continued to deny that he intentionally defrauded anyone. He told Religion News Service that his fall from grace led him to think differently about money. He said was so obsessed with his earthly empire that he ignored the spiritual foundations on which it was supposed to be based.
“I realized I had been teaching people how to get rich and how to fall in love with material things, and Christ says you can’t serve material things,” Bakker said in the interview. “He said, ‘Don’t build treasures on Earth.’”
Bakker also said that during his five years in prison, when he was known as Inmate Bakker, No. 07407-058, he wrote by hand all the words spoken by Jesus in the Gospels and also the names of people he considered enemies, which he said helped him repent.
“I began to make a list of everybody — the judge, the prosecutors, the ministers who helped put me in prison, those who testified against me, my friends who never have spoken to me since the day I lost PTL,” he said, noting he added his ex-wife Tammy Faye Messner to the list, along with her then-new husband, Roe, who helped him build the former Heritage USA.
“I prayed for them every day,” said Bakker. “There were days when I didn’t feel like it. Then, I would just read their names to God and I said, ‘God help me.”’
But his behavior caused critics to wonder if his repentance was real.
Jim and Lori Bakker launched “The Jim Bakker Show” in 2003, “sixteen years to the date that Pastor Jim had made his last broadcast from PTL,” according to his biography on the show’s website. On his new program, he continued many of the same fundraising techniques he developed during his PTL days. His new show attracted the attention of state and federal regulators in 2020 when he promoted a product sold on his program’s website as a cure for the coronavirus.